Tisha B’Av is always a struggle. How do I relate to this day, to the loss that reverberates through history but seems, at the same time, so very foreign to me. I can’t even imagine the miracles that were known to occur in the Beis Hamikdash. Indeed, I can’t imagine a place where bringing korbanos uplifted the people spiritually. I read about it – I write about it – and I daven daily that it should return, but I can honestly say I can’t actually conceive of it.
People do not like to talk about their spiritual challenges,
not when you live in a frum community. We like to talk about spiritual topics
and about problems in the frum world. We easily speak of the problems that we
think everyone can related to like not being able to concentrate on davening or
never having time to listen to shiur.
On Tisha B”Av, however, the real challenge is presented
square in our face – at least for me. I
don’t relate. I only have the fraction of an idea of what it is I am supposed to
relate too! I want to cry and yearn and feel my isolation from the Shechina,
but I am not even really sure what I would feel if we were not cut off. I mean,
the descriptions of it all are a little… awe-overwhelming, and I think I am
being honest enough to say that the very human part of me that fears change,
that likes the safety of the known and the surety of my achievements thus far
(little as they may really be on the spiritual level), is scared of knowing
what we have lost.
One of my children asked me why people watch videos about
the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av. I explained that they help people stay in the
somber mood, help them connect to the utter tragedy that is woven through our
incredible history. The child noted that the destructions were not what we were
supposed to be mourning, but rather we should be mourning our disconnect from
Hashem. The child is wise; the child is young.
Most years I, too, need help finding the mood, and I
probably will at some point tomorrow. But this year, as we headed into our day
of mourning, I had other thoughts. On
Tisha B’Av we are mourning the fact that our spiritual home is broken, and I know
now the pain of a home that is broken. I
know waking up and feeling loss, feeling sadness and pain and anger and the
desperate desire to know how to put things right. I know the heartache of seeing
my children have hurt that I cannot heal, that I cannot fix, even though it is
the thing that I most wish for. Is this,
Hashem, how You feel?
My pain right now is … selfish. Selfish in that it is bound
to me and my family. I can only imagine, Hashem, how much pain we have caused You.
I can only being to think I understand the pain I should be feeling for the
loss of our everything.
Being Bnei Yisrael means many things. One of my favorite
understandings of the term Yisrael is “He
who wrestles with God.” In true honesty, right now, I am not wrestling with God…
I am not yet on a level to even conceive of what that would feel like.
The pain of the day of Tisha B’Av is rooted in the crying
out of Bnei Yisrael after the report of the spies. They were scared to go into
Eretz Yisrael. They were scared to let go of the spiritual lives that they were
living in the Wilderness, to be on their own and responsible for themselves even
as Hashem promised them that He would be there with them.
They were scared to accept their independence with the
Shechina among them, and I am scared of what that actual spiritual dependence
might look and feel like. I live so deeply in the Olam Hazeh that I have to
work to mourn, that I often need to find tools to help me maintain my mourning
on this day.
The deep and difficult emotional tumult of my recent life
has given me pause for thought. I now know what it means to feel bereft, to
feel lost and empty and shattered… emotions I had never really experienced in
the many years of my life. As I sit here
and listen to Eicha, I am becoming aware that the feeling of my personal life
are, perhaps, a shadow of the feelings I should feel about the loss of Beis
Hamikdash, about the loss of the ability to understand what it means to have the
Shechina dwell among us.
And I feel like, perhaps, I can understand that Hashem “feels”
a similar loss from the other side, that He wants to understand how we, His
people, gave up on everything we built together.
Tonight is Tisha B’Av, the night and the day on which our people
cry for ourselves, cry for what we have been through and cry for what we have
lost. I have a long, long way to go on
my spiritual journey, on my path out of the wilderness that is truly full of thorns
and bristles, to even think of standing on the precipice of a spiritual haven.
But this year I feel, just a little more, like I understand how I should feel
about all that we are missing.
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